The World without Sight. A Comparative Study of Concept Understanding in Polish Congenitally Totally Blind and Sighted Children

Abstract

The paper presents the outcome of an experiment on concept understanding in polish congenitally totally blind and sighted children. A test of free associations was administered to a group of 40 sighted and 24 congenitally totally blind children between the ages of 7 and 9. The research instrument included 25 sample concepts grouped into four categories such as colors, nature phenomena, features of living organisms and physical processes. The collected responses lend support to the fact that there exist many impediments to proper concept understanding due to limited hands-on experience arising out of blindness, visible in the research by the presence of gaps in knowledge or egocentrism-based responses. The data exhibits a blind child's high dependence on contextual clues and a delay in the process of decontextualization, especially if it is not accompanied by sufficient stimulation from the child's environment.

The Associative Structure of the Mental Lexicon: Hierarchical Semantic Relations in the Minds of Blind and Sighted Language Users

“…including information about colour, light, etc.) were often analysed, in comparison with control groups of sighted respondents (as for example in Cutsforth, 1951 andNolan, 1960;see: Warren, 1994;Szczechowicz, 1976;Wyver, Markham, & Hlavacek, 2000;Mikołajczak-Matyja, 2004;Jaworska-Biskup, 2011). But in some works the relations between associative reactions and stimuli have also been analysed.…”

The Mechanism of Experience, Representation, and Verbal Reasoning on the Visually Impaired Individuals

“…The study finds that some inaccurate understanding remains after the treatment, but resulting in 'unique misconception' about science that is not presence in their sighted peers [16]. This 'unique misconception' has been noted by several previous studies [10]. The length of the treatment was assumed to be the primary failure in fixing those misconceptions, but further collaboration with formal education in school is predicted to be able to change that misconception.…”

“…This seems to align with the participants' reflection that parents who tend to facilitate their children, hence leaving nothing to do for the child, may result in less experience children. Studies seem to support this assumption [10]. This may predict the child's difficulty in grasping many abstract concepts, since it requires them to have something to compare with.…”

“…Many beliefs that visual experience is important to engaging in higher-order cognitive tasks, such as reasoning [10] since it is the main channel we use to observe environment [11]. Reasoning is the ability to make inferences or conclusion from information [12].…”

“…Therefore, it often requires one to engage in abstraction, or to go beyond the concrete experience. Experience and prior knowledge are also considered to have significant affect in reasoning [10,13], because the nature of reasoning allows individual to develop their own meaning in contrast to the information they receive. This seems to be the most common foundation of arguments surrounding the discussion on reasoning ability of individuals with visual impairment; that the loss of visual experience would compromise individuals to engage in complex cognitive tasks such as reasoning.…”